Learning and listening

A couple of useful podcast for you.

The Project Management Podcast by Cornelius Fichtner. An informative resource for anyone who is interested in developing their project management skills.

And

Managers Tools by Mike Auzenne and Mark Horstman, a weekly business podcast focused on helping business professionals become more effective managers and leaders.

Both handy additions to your iTunes library.

Cube Grenades

This is why I love the web so much.

Recently I was digging around Seth Godin's site for the post I made a couple of days back when I came across a reference and link to Hugh McLeod's blog. Hugh is an artist who, amongst other things, revisited the design for the cover for Purple Cow, one of the books by Seth Godin.

I was initially attracted by the art, but then some of his posts started to grab my attention. In particular his post on Cube Grenades fizzed it's way in to my brain. Cube Grenades are little thoughtful or challenging pieces that you can hang by your desk to provoke conversation with your co-workers and team members. In part he’s building on an earlier thought that he had, that social networks develop around social objects. And that these social objects can be the starting points for really interesting conversations and interactions. As Hugh says;

“This, I believe, is where my cartoons work the best - “Cube Grenades” - small objects that you “throw” in there in order to cause some damage – to start a conversation, to spread an idea, etc.”

I can't find the words to express just how much I love this idea, a lot of us will have come across pictures or quotes or objects that have resonated with us for some reason or another, that have generated ideas that we’ve wanted to share with others or given us insights that we might not have reached otherwise. A lot of people will have a Dilbert Cartoon or something similar on their wall which feeds the world-weary, cynic in all of us (confession: I start every day with a visit to the Dilbert website. It has just the right amount of world-weary cynicism to set me up for the day) but how much more powerful would the message you send out be if you had something that engaged on an emotionally or intellectually positive level.

Most of the art on Hugh’s site is free to download, on the sound principle that if you enjoy it then you might come back and purchase one of his high quality prints. Some of his Cube Grenade cartoons are here and there is loads more on his site for you to benefit from, including some really interesting thoughts on the subjects of advertising and marketing. I've included the free widget he has made available in the sidebar of this blog.

Oh, and Suz, if you're reading this, I really, really want one of his Moleskin notebook pieces.
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How We Learn from TED 2009

TED is an annual conference, first held in 1984, which started with aim of bringing together people from the worlds of Technology, Entertainment and Design (hence TED) to share ideas. It challenges some of the finest minds in these fields to stand up and “give the talk of their lives” in just 18 minutes. Perfect for the diminishing attention spans in our ADD world.

The TED’s website, whose tagline is “ideas worth spreading”, provides access to many of these talks at no cost. At the moment there is something like 400 talks archived and accessible. You can download them and use them providing you keep within the boundaries of the Creative Commons Licence (as I have with the Seth Godin video below), and you can subscribe and get the latest videos sent straight to your inbox.

One of the categories that you can currently access is titled How We Learn and includes 42 video from speakers like Steven Pinker, Bill Strickland, Dave Eggers and Michael Merzenich.

Incidentally, and related to yesterdays post, I found this talk from this year's TED by Seth Godin about "Tribes".

Seth Godin on "Tribes" at TED 2009

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Tribes

Seth Godin is an author and a leading voice on how to make your marketing more effective in the modern, digital, connected age. He's been described as 'the Ultimate Entrepreneur for the Information Age'

His latest book, Tribes, looks at how you go about building a movement that people will want to follow:

"...to bring together a tribe of like-minded people and do amazing things. There are tribes everywhere, all of them hungry for connection, meaning and change. And yet, too many people ignore the opportunity to lead, because they are "sheepwalking" their way through their lives and work, too afraid to question whether their compliance is doing them (or their company) any good... if you have a passion for what you want to do and the drive to make it happen, there is a tribe of fellow employees, or customers, or investors, or readers, just waiting for you to connect them with each other and lead them where they want to go."

By way of a freebie, Seth has collaborated on a list of 100 tactics you can use to help build your Tribe.

100 Ways to Build your Tribe

He's also produced a free e-book on the subject of Tribes, a sort of wisdom of the crowds piece with stories and ideas from members of his Ning group. The link is on his regularly updated Blog.

Tribes e-book
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Blog: Creative Energy Officer

I really like this blog from Jeremy Nulik. It's a good example of a well written business focused blog that has some good insights in to the elements that make businesses (and the people who run businesses) successful. Or not so successful in some cases.

Creative Energy Officer

Incidentally I found this blog when I was searching for some tips on how to make this blog more interesting (I know, I know.... I'm still working on it!). The excellent advice it contains is nagging away at me even as I write this.

How to make sure no one will read your blog (or listen to your ideas)

Active reviewing

Dr, Roger Greenaway has a really useful website providing articles, tips and advice around the subject of active (experience-based) reviewing.

Active Reviewing

There's also links to video based resources for those interested in the subject.

Academic Earth

This is an interesting idea. Six of the top US colleges (Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, MIT, Princeton & Stanford) are making videos of their lectures available on the Academic Earth website. Now under normal circumstances getting access to learning material of this quality would require you to be a student at one of the colleges and all that entails, but Academic Earth have the goal to give “…everyone on Earth access to a world-class eduction.”

They state:

"We are building a user-friendly educational eco-system that will give internet users the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars. Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment in which that content is remarkably easy to use and where user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.”

If you search under the “Entrepreneurship” section you’ll find all sorts of lectures on subjects that are really relevant to business today. I found material on leadership, coaching, finance, marketing, negotiation…. and loads more, all delivered by some of the top business names. People like Guy Kawasaki, Jerry Kaplan, Carly Fiorina, Trip Hawkins, Eric Schmidt and Larry Page will always have something interesting to say.

Naturally they also deliver more traditional academic subjects like biology, chemistry, English, physics, mathematics, etc.

Academic Earth has an ambitious goal, but I’ve always believed that this is exactly the sort of thing the internet ought to be utilised for. The capacity to deliver the very best learning materials to anyone in the world, for free and at their convenience is well within the capability of the system. All that’s needed is the content and the will of the content owners to allow that material to be distributed. Unfortunately at the moment there are some licencing issues which can affect a particular lecture if you don’t reside in a country that has permission to view it, but as far as I can tell that is the exception rather than the rule (and you could always use an anonymizer or proxy to hide your country of origin anyway).

There’s so much potential here. I really hope it achieves its ambition.

Persuasion and Creativity

Two sites from the same stable jam-packed with free links and resources around the subjects of creativity and persuasion.

For loads of material around the subject of creativity have a look at the Creating Minds website .

If your area of interest is persuasion then visit the Changing Minds website.

Incidentally, a great introduction to the area of persuasion is the excellent book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini, it's well worth having in your resource library.

The Go Game

There's an interview in the Guardian with Mei Lei and Chris Olson, the creators of the Go Game; an interactive, multimedia, real world adventure game.

I really, really want to find an excuse (and a budget) to use this for a learning event.

Guardian Go Game Interview

Alltop and Content Aggregation

I’m not 100% sure what to file this under, or how practical it is in reality, but Alltop just intrigues me so much. I can see it has potential but I can’t quite wrap my head around the best way to make use of it. Alltop is a content aggregator and the creators explain that:

“The purpose of Alltop is to help you answer the question, “What’s happening?” in “all the topics” that interest you. You may wonder how Alltop is different from a search engine. A search engine is good to answer a question like, “How many people live in China?” However, it has a much harder time answering the question, “What’s happening in China?” That’s the kind of question that we answer.

We do this by collecting the headlines of the latest stories from the best sites and blogs that cover a topic. We group these collections — “aggregations” — into individual web pages. Then we display the five most recent headlines of the information sources as well as their first paragraph. Our topics run from adoption to zoology with photography, food, science, religion, celebrities, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, Macintosh, and hundreds of other subjects along the way.

You can think of Alltop as the “online magazine rack” of the web. We’ve subscribed to thousands of sources to provide “aggregation without aggravation.” To be clear, Alltop pages are starting points—they are not destinations per se. Ultimately, our goal is to enhance your online reading by displaying stories from sources that you’re already visiting plus helping you discover sources that you didn’t know existed.”

For example the Alltop page on leadership give you a good idea of what to expect.

http://leadership.alltop.com/

On the downside it seems to be very US-centric, which is not necessarily a bad thing in the greater scheme of things but I do like to know what’s going on in the UK and European training arenas

I think this one has to sit and settle with me for a while to give me a chance to think through whether it is something that helps me or something that distracts me…. and on the subject of distraction take a look at http://humor.alltop.com/ if you want to lose an hour or so.

By the way, one of the creators of Alltop is Guy Kawasaki who is considered by a lot of people to be one of the top modern thinkers on the subject of Marketing. He writes a consistently interesting blog which can be found here.

Guy Kawasaki Blog

Getting Things Done (GTD) (2)

More on the Getting Things Done philosophy.

The iTunes store has a link to a useful podcast by Steve Robbins which covers a whole host of personal productivity topics. Most of the podcasts are only 5-6 minutes in length which makes them ideal for listening to during the journey to work or if you just want a quick learning hit.

Get-It-Done Guy on iTunes

Getting Things Done (GTD)

For the uninitiated, Getting Things Done (GTD) is a productivity/ time and task management methodology developed by David Allen. Advocates describe it as "a relatively simple methodology for getting stuff done in your life".

The good folk over at 43 Folders have put together a useful wiki to introduce the main concepts and provide links to some great resources.

43 Folders GTD wiki

If, like me, you find yourself constantly struggling to fit in everything that you need to do then GTD might be the answer you've been looking for. It's particularly "geek" friendly and there are loads of online tools available to support it.

Black Swans

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the excellent "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" (a must- read if you're at all interested in why banks and finance houses were institutionally incapable of stopping the financial melt down we're all experiencing) has written an article with some guidelines for avoiding similar situations.

Ten Principles of a Black Swan-Proof World (opens as a PDF)

I particularly like number 3, People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus; and number 4, don't let someone making an "incentive" bonus manage a nuclear plant

For more of his observations visit Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The Talent Code

Business Guru Tom Peters interviews Dan Coyle on his new book "The Talent Code"

"It started when I was paging through the sports page and noticed that there were an unusual number of top tennis players from this tiny club in Moscow. I looked into this more. As it turned out, this club, which is at the same latitude as Churchill, Manitoba—meaning it's not exactly tropical—had one indoor court. In fact, more world top-20 players came from this tiny club with the one indoor court than came from the entire United States.

So it got me thinking, what else is like this? Of course we're all aware of these quasi magical hotbeds. There's the baseball players from the Dominican Republic, this tiny island, that make up about 11% of the major leagues now. There are the soccer players from Brazil. In the world of math, there's this one high school in Bulgaria that produces all these incredible champions. In pop music, there's a little music studio in Dallas that's produced a high number of American Idol finalists, Jessica Simpson, Demi Lovato, Ryan Cabrera. Incredible, really."

I'm particularly intrigued by his description of "Deep Practice" as a method of learning more effectively.

Dan Coyle interview